Bush's leap into the public eye came after Pearl Harbor, when President
Roosevelt appointed him director of the Office of Scientific Research and
Development (OSRD), a special agency reporting directly to the White House.
As Roosevelt's chief adviser on military technology, Bush organized the
Manhattan Project and hired 6,000 civilian researchers around the country
to conduct weapons work under contract. He and the president together made
the final decision to go ahead with an all-out drive to build an atomic
bomb. He also oversaw the creation of scores of formidable, though lesser-known,
military tools such as radar and the proximity fuze.

One of Bush's pet projects was an ultrapowerful longbow for use by the
European resistance against the Nazis. A recreational archer, he took satisfaction
in improving
a centuries-old weapon that required the individual's skill and moxie -
a reminder that even in an age of impersonal, instant death through massive
air bombardment or atomic annihilation, it was still possible for an individual
to make a difference. Bush was no stranger to espionage, either. He set
up an ultrasecret research group within the OSRD to build special weapons
for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA. One dubious
line of work involved mind-altering drugs that could be slipped into enemy
agents' drinks.

Once an Allied victory over Germany and Japan seemed inevitable, Bush was
eager to start thinking about organizing science and engineering for peaceful
purposes. In "The Endless Frontier," a 1945 report to President Truman,
he presented a blueprint for a permanent system of
federal support for civilian science and engineering, which at its height
pumped tens of billions of dollars annually into research and development.
Bush's plans led directly to the two crown jewels of this federally funded
innovation system: the National Science Foundation, which funds university
professors, and the Advanced Research Project Agency, the Pentagon's chief
avenue for basic research. "Bush is responsible for the whole architecture
of government support for science," says Paul Ceruzzi, a curator at the
Smithsonian Institution. "Today, everyone thinks these terrific innovations
came from the minds of bright kids, but they don't realize that these kids
needed an environment to be
in. It came from Bush. He said, 'Give these people money, let them play,
and they'll come up with something.'"

But Bush also wanted to help the iconoclastic innovator, the driven thinker
whose best work was done alone. Despite his long involvement with powerful
institutions, Bush personally recoiled from bureaucracies and their stifling
rules, preferring
an early version of Silicon Valley's golden rule: Act first and request
permission later. "My whole philosophy on this sort of thing is very simple,"
he once said. "If I have any doubt as to whether I am supposed to do
a job or not, I do it, and if someone socks me, I lay off."

Indeed, even as Bush helped build the mammoth business and military institutions
that dominated postwar America, he worked to reduce empire-building by
government agencies. He began "liquidating" the OSRD even before the end
of the war. And well into the 1950s, he complained about the proliferation
of overlapping military research programs and the tendency for large corporations
to stifle the innovator. He even singled out for special criticism IBM
and General Motors, which exemplified one of Bush's favorite dicta about
American industry: "In mass, we do not seem to make much sense."

That cult of bigness threatened Bush's cherished idea about the power of
individuals and promised to put the organization man at center stage. "The
individual to me is everything," he once wrote. "I would circumscribe him
just as little as possible."

But how could the individual remain free to dissent and create outside
the reigning orthodoxy imposed by organization men
in gray flannel suits? It was to answer that question that Bush conceived
what we would today recognize as the personal computer and the Web.

Bush's "As We May Think" essay, published just a few weeks before he attended
the Trinity atom-bomb test in the New Mexico desert, promised that technology
would "give man access to and command of the inherited knowledge of the
ages." Bush imagined the memex machine sitting on
a desk, with viewing screens, a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers.
Printed
and written material, even personal notes, would be stored on microfilm,
retrieved rapidly, and displayed on screen by a high-speed "selector."